While the Nook HD+ is a well-known budget Android tablet, the days of the Nook may be numbered. According to a report by TechCrunch, internal documents indicate that Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) is offering Barnes & Noble, Inc. (BKS) a $1B USD buyout to acquire some of the assets of Nook Media LLC, which Microsoft will then look to reposition as the go-to digital college textbook source across its platforms.

The platform has seen it successes, selling 10 million units to date. While far from Amazon's Kindle sales, Nook's active base of 7 million subscribers is certainly worth something. But the ongoing losses have caused the company to question the utility of that asset.

The book seller had looked to spin off the unit, but stabilized when Microsoft injected $300M USD into the "Newco" joint e-book venture. Microsoft owned approximately 16.8 percent stake in Newco, while B&N owned 83.2 percent ($1.49B USD) of the venture as of its April 2012 launch.

The bid indicates that the Nook partnership has significantly devalued in recent months. The documents indicate that B&N is worth $1.66B USD, while Nook Media is valued at $1B USD. That's significantly less than the original $1.7B USD valuation, or the $1.8B USD valuation from January when UK-publisher Pearson PLC (LON:PSON) bought a 5 percent stake in Nook Media for $85M USD.

II. What's Next

If Microsoft's bid succeeds, it will gain select units of Nook Media -- reportedly the college textbook division. Nook Media will keep the e-reader and core e-book business.

But documents reveal that the current plan is a phase-out of Nook Media's titular hardware offerings. Nook may soon no longer make Nooks.

Android tablets will die out first, being discontinued by the end of next year (2014). The lower-priced E-INK readers will continue to be sold into 2015, but are expected to suffer a quiet death as customers abandon the power-efficient, but aged form factor for glistening tablets.

The documents indicate that Nook Media will lose $360M USD this fiscal year, following losses of $262M USD last year in B&N's fiscal 2012, which ended in April. But with the hardware phaseout, Microsoft predicts the unit will recover to $362M USD in annual profit by 2017.

Nook e-book apps are currently available on every major platform -- Android, iOS, Windows, and OS X.

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Mix a top-tier textbook platform with OneNote/Office and you have an incredibly strong incentive for students to buy your product. Once they're invested in the platform for a multi-year term, chances are they'll stick with it as long as it's robust. With millions of new students entering the system every year, and generally being fairly savvy, they would make the platform robust with new apps, furthering the incentive to buy for those outside the student segment.

I guarantee you iPad was successful early on in no small part due to students.